Texas Gov. Greg Abbott yesterday signed a bill designating Mexican cartels “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” a move intended to give state authorities more tools with which to fight them. And “fight” is the operative word, as the cartels become ever richer and more violent and brazen.
Just last week, officials in the Mexican state of Jalisco found dozens of bags containing human body parts in the town of Zapopan, near Guadalajara in Central Mexico. Some of the remains appear to be of workers at a call center kidnapped earlier by members of the Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), a gang at war with the Sinaloa Cartel.
Meanwhile, earlier this week over on the Pacific coast, the mayor of Tijuana, Montserrat Caballero, announced that she has been forced to relocate to a Mexican army base after receiving death threats from cartels. On the same day of her announcement, Tijuana police discovered an abandoned vehicle containing seven dead bodies, obvious cartel victims.
Elsewhere, on June 1 in Tamaulipas state on the Gulf coast, members of the Gulf Cartel set up a checkpoint entering the town of Soto La Marina and kidnapped five tourists who had driven across from the United States. Those kidnap victims, all males originally from the Dominican Republic, were rescued by Mexican police.
The open-borders policies of the Biden administration have served to enrich the cartels, who have diversified from drug smuggling by expanding into human smuggling. According to a 2021 report posted to the Border Report website, cartels can charge between $8,000 and $15,000 to smuggle a single migrant into the United State.